


Crisps and Nods

by m_class



Series: 007 Fest 2019 Angst Prompt Table [8]
Category: James Bond (Classic movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst Prompt Table 2019 - Disembowelment, Disembowelment, Food, Gen, Gore, Hospitals, Humor, Injury, Vomit Mention, emotionally repressed spy friendships, smoking mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 17:14:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20067637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: After a mission ends gruesomely, Eve sits in a hospital waiting room with her fellow MI6 agents, wishing spies were just a little less terrible at dealing with this kind of thing.





	Crisps and Nods

**Author's Note:**

> Each prompt fic can be read as a stand-alone or as part of the series in order.

Eve kicks in the door in time to drop the three men standing over James’s body with five neat shots to heads and sternums. In a few long strides she is kneeling at his side, and oh god, you don’t survive things like this, you don’t survive having internal organs ripped outside your body, but if anyone can survive outright disembowelment it would probably be James Fucking Bond and she needs him to, she needs him, and so she holds his hand and says  _ Hang on, James _ as 008 yells for a medic behind her.

Then there are medics running in, and Eve keeps hold of his hand as they encircle him; keeps hold of his hand until the stretcher is being carried away. In the sudden silence that follows, she stands there for a few seconds longer, staring at James’s blood on the floor, until she shakes herself and walks out of the room through the door through which she entered, a few minutes and a lifetime ago.

The hospital waiting room is anonymous and brightly lit, like every other hospital waiting room. Furnished a bit more comfortably than average, maybe. Eve stands by the vending machine, reading the names of the types of crisps over to herself for the thousandth time, as though she expects to find some secret meaning in them.

She needs a cigarette. She needs to cry. She needs to throw up.

Pringles. Brannigans. Doritos. Walkers.

There are footsteps in the hall behind her, and a low, crisp, “Moneypenny.”

She turns. M is there, Robinson at her side.

“He’s still in surgery,” she says. Though of course they know that, or they wouldn’t be here, in this waiting room, now.

Robinson nods; glances at the vending machine.

Eve nods back.

“Have you eaten?” he asks, after another few seconds of reciprocal taciturn nodding. M is checking something on her Blackberry.

Eve nods, again.

“Right. Good,” he says, heading for the nearest bank of chairs. She follows him. So does M, putting her phone away.

“You did a fine job in the field, Moneypenny,” she says.

Eve nods. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Silence. There is a muffled buzzing from M’s pocket, and she answers the call, which turns out to be coming from an entirely separate iPhone. 

Robinson checks his own phone, and Eve stares at the patterns in the carpet.

“Yes? Yes. I can’t talk right now.” M’s voice is slightly snappish, the closest she gets to letting emotion through to the surface. “We’ll discuss it at the meeting tomorrow.” Thumbing the ‘end call’ button aggressively, she drops the phone back in her pocket.

Eve glances at the surgery-status screen mounted on the wall. James’s privately identifying number is the one in the middle; he’s been in three hours, but for an emergency surgery with no estimated end time, she has no way of knowing whether that’s bad or good.

M’s pocket buzzes again, and she pulls out an Android, snorts in disgust, and puts it away again without answering.

“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” Robinson says, glancing up at the screen and back at Eve.

Eve sighs, a bit, to herself, looking from Robinson to M and then back to Robinson again, some tiny, buried corner of her soul wishing that one of them was the kind of person she could throw herself at and just fucking sob for a bit.

Rising to her feet, she stands, walking to the vending machine and feeding coins into the slot until it produces a bag of Doritos, which she carries back to the MI6-inhabited corner of the waiting room and opens before depositing it onto the low laminate coffeetable.

M takes a crisp, getting Eve a stiff nod of thanks.

Eve sighs to herself again, very quietly, as she watches the two of them. 

They are not soft people; they are not, perhaps, good people. But they are her people, and that counts for something, right here, right now.

She smiles back at Robinson, feeling how the smile is crooked on her face, but meeting his eyes anyway.

“Yes. I’m quite sure that he will.”


End file.
